“What his résumé lacked was five bad papers.” By that, he meant that while the candidate had published several papers containing enough genuinely important ideas to satisfy any rational hiring committee — more than could be said of most faculty members — he had too few to satisfy the bean counters, who fretted about how uninformed outsiders might react to the appointment.

Data and facts do not live entirely alone, but within the context of other facts. Decisions using measures without context can lead to management dysfunction as described in Robert Austins book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations .

That is not to suggest that using measurement to make decisions is wrong! On the contrary. But getting the whole story takes some work. It is also quite a bit of work to explain just what a measure means. It is no wonder people distrust being measured, they are afraid of how the measure might be used against them.